ESO Photo Release | 2016 Mar 23
[img3="Credit: ESO. Acknowledgement: VST/Omegacam Local Group Survey"]http://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1610a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]This scene, captured by ESO’s OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), shows a lonely galaxy known as Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, or WLM for short. Although considered part of our Local Group of dozens of galaxies, WLM stands alone at the group’s outer edges as one of its most remote members. In fact, the galaxy is so small and secluded that it may never have interacted with any other Local Group galaxy — or perhaps even any other galaxy in the history of the Universe.
Rather like an uncontacted tribe living deep in the Amazon rainforest or on an island in Oceania, WLM offers a rare insight into the primordial nature of galaxies that have been little disturbed by their environment.
WLM was discovered in 1909 by German astronomer Max Wolf, and identified as a galaxy some fifteen years later by astronomers Knut Lundmark and Philibert Jacques Melotte — explaining the galaxy’s unusual moniker. The dim galaxy is located in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster) about three million light-years away from the Milky Way, which is one of the three dominant spiral galaxies in the Local Group.
WLM is quite small and lacks structure, hence its classification as a dwarf irregular galaxy. WLM spans about 8000 light-years at its greatest extent, a measurement that includes a halo of extremely old stars discovered in 1996 (eso9633). ...
